Cholesterol-Complaining Caller

RUSH: Here is Jeff, Grand Junction, Colorado. Welcome, sir. Glad you waited.

CALLER: Dittos, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I just want to take issue from what you said on Friday, it’s been eating at me all week. First, I want to compliment you because you’re blessed genetically to be in such great shape without exercise, that your blood work comes out — and I just wanted — the statement you made, that you took kind of in the light of the Drive-By Media, you took a fatally flawed clinical study that said reducing total cholesterol can’t reduce strokes. And I’m very passionate about this —

RUSH: The report said it doesn’t. They were shocked. They were stunned to find that it doesn’t reduce strokes. It actually has more impact on heart disease. It doesn’t reduce stroke.

CALLER: Yeah. You didn’t look at the fatal flaw in the study. They’re looking at total cholesterol. The American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiologists, and NCEP all agree that it’s LDL cholesterol, it’s the low density lipoprotein cholesterol which is the bad cholesterol that is the marker. Total cholesterol brings in HDL as well, triglycerides, and several other amino acids. But if you look at reducing LDL cholesterol, there is a statin that has been proven and has indications from the FDA to reduce the relative risk of stroke. Even with diabetic patients if you cut that risk in half. So I’m worried about the patients out there that may have taken your superior genetic makeup and someone who doesn’t have to worry about their cholesterol and —

RUSH: Wait, that’s not what I did. Some people may not have heard the segment that you’re talking about, so let me briefly recap it for people so that your comments can be understood. There was a story last week from some science bunch that has been studying statins and they’ve been studying cholesterol, they were stunned to find out that drugs given to people with high cholesterol to prevent strokes actually didn’t do that, worked more on heart disease and so forth. And my point was that this is not new, that every day we are given some new medical miracle solution or discovery. Eating three Milk Duds a day will ward off Alzheimer’s disease for an additional ten years. It’s that ridiculous, and then five years later we’ll find out that eating three Milk Duds has absolutely no effect on Alzheimer’s, and this has been going on my entire life.

So we’ve had people believing that these pills are going to make them healthy regarding cholesterol and stroke, and all of a sudden say no, no, no, we were wrong. I’m basically mocking this whole process of how experts end up talking about — then I get into my own personal history about my blood pressure and the blood work, I just had a physical and so forth, and actually was not tying that to drugs in any way, shape, manner, or form. I was trying to say that we’re all different, and that we’re all going to get something someday, regardless of our genetic makeup, that nobody has yet cheated and defied death. It’s going to happen to all of us at some point, and no matter how healthy we are in one or five areas, something is going to go wrong and we’re going to get something. That was my only point. I’m not knocking drugs. I wasn’t knocking the drug in that story. I’m knocking the researchers and the scientists who get people all worked up about these things and then some months or years later, ‘Uh, sorry, we were wrong.’

CALLER: Well, you painted with a broad brush there, Rush. Let’s talk about someone who’s at risk for —

RUSH: Hang on.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Back to Jeff in Grand Junction, Colorado. We left off with you saying that I was painting with too broad a brush.

CALLER: That’s correct, Rush. And I just wanted to go back to the stroke patient, someone who is at risk of stroke.

RUSH: By the way, who is at risk of stroke? Isn’t everybody?

CALLER: Let’s say that the greatest risk of stroke, someone who already has cardiovascular disease, already has some blockage of arteries within their body, and basically there’s two ways to look at it. You have the genetic inclination, like if your father passed from a stroke, like myself, and that’s why I have studied this intricately, and then there’s lifestyle, and lifestyle can be stress, diet, alcohol, the whole gamut.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: And when you said that the experts have proven that drugs such as statins can’t reduce the risk of stroke, you were incorrect.

RUSH: Well, all right, then I’ll take it on the chin here for the Drive-By Media. But I think I said they were surprised that it didn’t in their clinical trials.

CALLER: In the clinical trial you quoted, and it was a fatally flawed trial, clinical trial —

RUSH: Well, I shoulda known, it’s the Drive-By Media, but they were quoting these doctors.

CALLER: And, yeah, once again, they were wrong.

RUSH: Well, what is your level of expertise in this, Jeff? I mean, you obviously have a deep passion about it, your family and so forth. But you sound like you have passion beyond even that.

CALLER: Well, yeah, my father passed from several strokes. And upon his passing, I looked at my life and decided to do something completely within. I was a sales representative so I decided to get into pharmaceutical sales and focus on cardiovascular disease.

RUSH: Really? You are in pharmaceutical sales?

CALLER: That’s correct.

RUSH: Wow. You mentioned a drug earlier, a statin that is effective that you found on reducing stroke?

CALLER: Correct. And I’m not at liberty to say the name of the drug or the company I work with.

RUSH: You’re not at liberty to say that?

CALLER: No.

RUSH: Oh, that’s too bad.

CALLER: Yeah, but any doctor could tell you. It’s the most prescribed drug in the history of medicine.

RUSH: Well, does it begin with an L?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Okay, I think I know.

CALLER: (laughing)

RUSH: Okay, I almost blew it, I almost said the name. I don’t want to get you in trouble. I don’t want to get in trouble either. So you sell the stuff?

CALLER: Yes, I do. It’s my life work, and I do have passion. And when you said it affects cardiovascular disease and not strokes, strokes are caused by cardiovascular disease. Stroke is a lack of blood getting to the brain.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: So if it helps in treating cardiovascular disease, it’s going to help with anyone who may be having a stroke.

RUSH: Well, you know, you have a good point here. There could have been an agenda behind this story, who knows what it is, the Drive-Bys love to create havoc and crisis then say, ‘Ooops, sorry, here’s another crisis because our first crisis was wrong.’ It could well be somebody is out there trying to sabotage the drug you work for, sell and so forth, and could be the case. I, frankly, again, was simply trying to zero in on the process by which we’re all told all of this stuff. I’ll state my point and make it again. Every day people are doing things, taking things, not eating certain things and eating certain other things because they have been told that that’s healthy and that’s not healthy, and this will prevent this, and that will prevent that, but this will cause that, and that will cause this. Then every so often we find out that what we were told was wrong.

The whole aura or the whole atmosphere, the context of which this stuff happens is to promote fear that we’re all killing ourselves; we’re going to die unless we do this, unless we do that. Global warming, the same thing, and so that was the focus I was taking. I cited these examples countless times. Coffee was going to kill you, now it’s good for you. Now nicotine, horrible, ooh, ban it, might guard against Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, one of the two, I forget which. Then we had oat bran. Yes, oat bran was the miracle food that was going to clean you out, keep you clean and so forth. Sorry, we were wrong. So I think it’s more a media formula that I was attacking there, but I’m glad you called and attempted to set the record here. I appreciate it.

Bill in Maryville, Illinois. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hi.

RUSH: Hi.

CALLER: I think a lot of these studies are correlational in nature. Correlation is the degree of association between two variables. And if you have a plus-one correlation, that means they’re absolutely correlated. If you have a negative one correlational coefficient, there’s no association at all. But no matter what the correlation coefficient, it doesn’t imply causality. And I think what they do is they take a bunch of variables, throw them together and do these correlation coefficients, and they see what comes out with a reasonably high correlation. The only way you can determine causality, for example, if X causes Y, let’s say you have waist size and intelligence, and you want to see if those two factors correlate, well, they might correlate pretty high, so you might say, well, people with large waists are more intelligent than people with smaller waists.

RUSH: I can accept that, too.

CALLER: So the only way to prove it is to take one and test it against the other with a test like a T tester and an analysis of variance. Now, there was an example that I heard of where a guy did a study with 20 factors, and he did 20 T tests, and when he was asked why did you do 20 T tests, he said, well, I understood how to do that. Well, the correct way to do it would have been analysis of variance, where you can test a lot of variables at the same time. And that’s where you get a degree of significance. And that will statistically imply causality where a correlation won’t.

RUSH: See, when you’ve got causality and correlation, and then you come back with causality, your example that you gave about larger waist size indicating a higher IQ —

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: — that’s absurd, but yet there are people doing things just like that.

CALLER: Well, I think what they’re doing —

RUSH: If you eat three Milk Duds, you are less likely to give birth to a deformed child. It’s absurd what’s out there.

CALLER: I think what they’re doing is they’re just taking a lot of factors, variables, and throwing them into a pot and see what correlates with what.

RUSH: They may be doing that. But more interesting to me is their motivation for doing it, and you’ve got a bunch of people out there who are searching desperately for money, scientists, so-called scientists wanting research grants, and so all they’ve gotta do is say we’ve done this causality correlation study, and we have found X.

CALLER: No, there is no such thing as a causality correlation study.

RUSH: Sorry about that, you’re right.

CALLER: That may lead them to something, and then they should do the causality study.

RUSH: Right. My point is —

CALLER: The example I gave you about the guy who did 20 T tests and four or five of them showed to be significant, well, the more that you do, the more chance you have of them showing significance. Or if he used the wrong procedure, statistically he didn’t understand the correct procedure. So to prove something that has statistical significance, you can’t do it by correlation, you have to do it, for example, like with an analysis of variance where you would get .95 or a .99 statistical significance.

RUSH: Right, but you’re still projecting and guessing because you can’t test everybody.

CALLER: No, but if your sample is large enough, you can.

RUSH: Well, I know that’s what pollsters say about political polling and so forth. But I’m still more interested in what’s driving this, because it is producing some of the most cockamamie, outrageous, unbelievable things that we’re being told about our health and about any number of other aspects of life — it’s a joke.

CALLER: Well, I’m sure you’re right. It’s a search for money, and ‘publish or perish’ in the academic world.

RUSH: Well, there’s also something else behind this, and there’s a political ideology involved, and that’s liberalism, and it’s nannyism, and it’s nobody knows what to do to take care of themselves, only we who do these studies, the smart people, the elites, only we can tell you how to live because you’re too stupid to know how to live, and so you’ve got to be told, for example, that you shouldn’t go to McDonald’s or that you shouldn’t have this or that. Frankly it irritates me because it’s insulting to people. What is wrong with people just living their lives? Do you realize how much micromanagement the liberals in this country would love to perpetrate?

That’s what global warming is all about, folks, is telling you how you can and can’t live, where you can and can’t go, what you can and can’t drive, what bags you can and can’t use in the grocery store. It’s absurd. It’s frankly absurd. It bothers me to no end, but people end up believing this because nobody wants to get sick and nobody wants to die. Well, throw the suicide candidates out. But nobody wants to die so people will eat this stuff up and start doing all of these things, and it may end up being harmless, but it still irritates me that there is this attempt to have this much control over people’s thoughts, their attitudes, and their actions.

<*ICON*> Read Rush’s Original Coverage…
Sorry, There’s No Avoiding Death – 11.03.07